The EMAILS Man

In an excellent post about the latest episode of the Times collaborating with right-wing goons in a baseless smear job, Dan Froomkin details all the journalistic errors, which are worth detailing because none of them are one-offs:

• You don’t print articles based on hacked data unless they are truly newsworthy. The fact that Mamdani, whose childhood was spent in Africa, checked several boxes including one for “African American” on a failed college application when he was 17 is not newsworthy. Its only value is to his political opponents, to employ as a scurrilous attack.
• You identify the source of the hack as fully as possible, so the readers can judge their motives. You don’t cover up the source’s identity and motives, like the Times did – you expose them. The source, as quickly became clear, was a noted eugenicist named Jordan Lasker.
• You don’t use the format of an attack story unless there’s a legitimate grievance. (First paragraph: Mamdani says X. Second paragraph starts with the word “But.”)
• You don’t hide behind a headline that says the disclosure you just made “raises scrutiny“. It’s either legitimate news or it’s not. (And it isn’t.)
• You don’t bury key information. Here, that Mamdani wrote in “Ugandan” as a way of explicating his checked box. (He was born there.)
• You don’t engage in racial policing. That is socially harmful and highly unseemly, especially coming from such a white-dominated institution.
• You don’t publish political stories whose lead byline is a free-lance writer who is a culture warrior. Benjamin Ryan is well known online as a critic of trans healthcare and trans reporters.
• You don’t rush to print in order to “scoop” a right-wing culture warrior. Semafor reported that Times editors hurried to greenlight the article because they had heard Rufo was also pursuing the story. That should actually have made them hesitate to print, rather than hurry.

All of these points are good. In particular, any time a draft of an investigative piece results in a “raises scrutiny” or “casts shadows” etc., a reporter’s laptop should be immediately triggered to have Jason Robards say “you haven’t got it”:

Froomking also notes that in lieu of a public editor the Times now has an “assistant managing editor for standards and trust,” who is none other than…Patrick Healy, the guy whose recent work as Deputy Opinion Editor produced such hits as “running Paul Krugman out of the paper for writing too much and too pointedly about topics not pre-approved by Chris Rufo” and “convening an emergency panel to discuss Donald Trump’s imaginary popularity.” Essentially, the Times thinks that the way you maintain “standards” and gain “trust” is nonstop trolling of the paper’s liberal readership.

Elizabeth Lopatto has more:

Healy, who’s worked at the Times since 2005, has a fascinating track record with judging newsworthiness. There’s his bizarre fixation on Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage (resulting in a column from the now-defunct public editor desk at the Times that found, among other things, that parts of Healy’s story belonged in “the trash can”); his sexist focus on Hillary Clinton’s laugh; and his frankly misleading (and heavily rewritten) coverage of Donald Trump’s “audacious attempt” to “remake his image” on immigration. Perhaps most notably, Healy was, as a reporter, one of the driving forces in the “but her emails” nothingburger in the Times’ 2016 election coverage, a news cycle so pointless and destructive that it had newsrooms everywhere rethinking ethics around hacked and leaked sourcing (but not, apparently, Mamdani’s hacked and leaked college application). More recently, longtime columnist Paul Krugman blamed Healy for his departure from the paper, complaining that “Patrick often—not always—rewrote crucial passages” resulting in Krugman saying he was “putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft.”

Under Healy, the Times’ politics desk had some difficulty correctly identifying right-wing sources. For instance, the “Trump voter” in this article’s lead anecdote, Gina Anders, was a board member of a PAC that “seeks to defend Confederate statues & nullify the ACA [Affordable Care Act],” according to Congressman Ted Lieu. In another article about Atlanta-area “surburbanites” who are “sticking with Trump,” two of the four voters interviewed were misleadingly identified; one was a Republican consultant and the other was the chair of “the state’s branch of the Republican National Lawyers Association,” who was also appointed to Republican governor Brian Kemp’s election security task force. 

I, personally, do not currently have a lot of trust in the standards of the Times politics desk.